Abai Kunanbaiuly (1845–1904) was a prominent Kazakh thinker and poet of the nineteenth century. His seminal work, Words of Edification, is a wisdom-laden text that emerged amid Kazakhstan’s identity, cultural, and colonial crises. In forty-five Words, Abai articulates profound humanistic and ethical reflections. This study, employing a directed qualitative content analysis and a philosophical hermeneutic approach, seeks to demonstrate how Abai’s ideas on wisdom and knowledge in Words of Edification are intricately linked to the cultural identity of Kazakhs and the Intellectual Space of Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the central question of this research is: How does Abai, through redefining the concepts of wisdom and knowledge, respond to the Kazakh cultural identity and the Intellectual Space of Central Asia crisis and formulate a model of ethical-cultural subjectivity? Through analyzing selected passages, the article reveals that Abai was not only a poet and social reformer but also a morally grounded philosopher striving to cultivate the traits of a conscious human being amid an identity crisis in Central Asia. In Abai’s view, wisdom serves as a tool for discerning good from evil, while knowledge becomes a means for seeking truth and justice. These concepts connect to moral self-cultivation on the individual level, social reform on the communal level, and cultural identity reconstruction in the face of foreign domination on the historical level. Thus, Words of Edification is a multilayered text aimed at both personal identity and collective awakening, offering a model for nurturing the “wise and committed human.”